Harold Love's Scribal Publication in
Seventeenth-Century England does what most
scholars wish they could and what few actually
accomplish. By envisioning manuscript artifacts not
as grist for print editions but rather as evidence of
past activity, Love opens up a new arena for inquiry.
Specifically, I believe that wider use of the
strategies he deploys will provide us with "an
understanding" that both scribal transmission
and "reading" were activities "that
w[ere] always communal as well as individual"
(230).

Love divides the book into three sections:
"Scribal Publication" (chapters 1-3),
" Script and Society" (chapters 4-7), and,
finally, " Editing Scribally Published
Texts" (chapter 8). Part One identifies
"The Phenomenon" (chapter 1) of scribal
publication by examining "two contributory
sub-types of the scribally published text, the
manuscript newsletter and the 'separate'" (9).
"'Publication' in the scribal medium"
(chapter 2) reconceptualizes the scribal medium as
neither "inferior" to nor an
"incomplete" version of print (35), but
simply as a "movement from a private realm of
creativity to a public realm of consumption"
(36).

The criteria for determining whether a text made the
transition from private to public are initially
described as two: "both a 'strong' sense, in
which the text must be shown to have become publicly
available, and a more inclusive 'weak' sense, in
which it is enough to show that the text has ceased
to be a private possession. A third criterion, or at
least a significant condition for consideration of a
document as a "scribal publication" is
evidence that it is "something more than the
chrysalis stage of an intended print
publication" (36).

After this careful qualification, chapter three
examines the activity of "Scribal
production," which is limited to "the paid
rather than the amateur scribe"; the conclusions
drawn from the artifacts are similarly limited to
"entrepreneurial . . . and author
publication" in manuscripts (91). Within this
discussion, Love provides an important overview of
scribal training, hands, "editorial"
practices common to particular scribal occasions, scriptoria,
and the preparation of ink, quills, and paper. In
doing so, he gestures convincingly toward the kinds
of information that must be included in materialist
studies of manuscript culture.

"Part Two: Script and Society" introduces
"Some metaphors for reading," to
contextualize the distinguishable epistemologies of
oral, chirographic and typographic transmission. The
tendency to infuse textual inscription with sexual
metaphors, violence, and varying notions of authority
does, in part, identify what speech-act theorists
call the "'performative' role[s]" that
"script and print" (158) play in the
"exercise of power" (173). Having
identified the position of the manuscript text in
"cultural symbologies," Love moves on to
what is for me the most compelling aspect of his
study: "The social uses of the scribally
published text." On the one hand, scribal
publication was a method of "acquiring and
transmitting information;" on the other hand, it
served to bond "groups of like-minded
individuals into a community, sect or political
faction" (177). Drawing on Habermas's notion of
a "public sphere" (203), this elegant
examination of the various semi-private and
semi-public contexts in which manuscript texts played
a social--and socializing--role arrives at the
conclusion that the "conditions imposed by the
site [of production] would have determined the nature
of the collections assembled."

To provide "a detailed case study of the
practical workings of scribal publication,"
chapter six, "Restoration scriptorial
satire," focuses on a particular tradition, and
traces the scribal process, from initial exchanges of
loose sheets through compilation of enormous
manuscript anthologies. Love's method of inquiry
suggests a paradigm for similar investigation of
other kinds of scribal documents, opening an
important avenue for continued scholarly inquiry into
manuscript culture. Acknowledging "The ambiguous
triumph of print," in chapter seven, Love
examines the progress of a single writer, Jonathan
Swift, from manuscript to print. Therein he
convincingly concludes that the "force of
Swift's satire . . . can be seen to depend crucially
on his involvement in the historical project of
translating script values into the medium of
print" (308).

"Part Three: Editing Scribally Published
Texts" is for me the most revealing part of the
book. After 312 pages of exciting, innovative
rethinking of the ways we might approach the
artifacts of scribal publication as they can be
investigated in the context of their social and
symbolic occasions, it is quite a surprise to turn
again to editing and the more permanent medium of
print. For the strength of the argument that editing
is "the creation of an argument or a series
of arguments embodied in a record of
transmissional history" (356 [emphasis mine])
reveals the important transition Love's study has
made. His movement--away from the scholarly agenda
that seeks to perfect (via printing) the textual
icons of manuscript culture--to interrogation of the
extant textual witnesses in all their idiosyncratic
integrity is one from which we can all learn. For, as
we move from a print-dominated epistemology to a
digital culture, the transmissional medium may seem
less a textual "problem" than a social
reality--a digital reality with precedence in scribal
culture.